


Centuries

by ShadowHaloedAngel



Series: Soldier's Songs [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Assassination, Assassins & Hitmen, vengeance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 18:24:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3218867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowHaloedAngel/pseuds/ShadowHaloedAngel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Hydra had left him anything, it was a legacy soaked in blood. </p><p>If that was to be his legacy, then he would be certain it was lived to the full.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Centuries

**Author's Note:**

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBr7kECsjcQ
> 
> http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/falloutboy/centuries.html

He was an avenging angel these days. Such angels didn't trouble themselves with purity, with the commandments that god had handed down to mankind. Their very existence was soaked in blood, with wings stained red and screams echoing around to herald their arrival. 

He had lived past his time, and for so long his destiny had been in the hands of others. They had taken him, corrupted him and moulded him to their own perverse dreams. For so long he had been the epitome of their perfection and the symbol of the means to their ends. A dark secret and a poisoned source of pride. 

With the clarity of cold hindsight he was sure that they had enjoyed stripping him of everything he had once been. It hadn't been a simple process. They might have just reprogrammed him superficially... but that would never have been enough. Instead they had tortured him, scrubbed from every corner of his mind the person he had been... leaving just enough innocence to taint his dreams and leave him screaming every night. It didn't do to have a weapon with a conscience, but returned at the right time it kept him broken and subservient. 

Or it had. 

He was under no illusions that he could become again the man he had been born. He would never stand by Steve's side again, and he didn't think he wanted to. There were expectations on Sergeant Barnes, a role that he would be fit into, a mould that he would be forced to fill. The history books had made sure of that. He had been a convenient tool for propaganda. 

Hydra had made him a propaganda tool too, admittedly a nameless fear rather than revealing his existence. That would have played their card too early, but even now it would not have helped them. 

Every illusion he had had before had been ripped away and he didn't believe in anything anymore. The system had only betrayed him.

He knew all the stories, the stories of Barnes and his heroism, the stories of the Winter Soldier and his merciless kills. Those were all too tidy. He had no interest in being tidy anymore, and while he had no doubt SHIELD were on his tail, they would never catch up. He was too good for that. 

He was renouncing all connection to those legends and forging a new one, one that would be remembered in all its visceral detail. 

He was not a good man, but that did not mean he had to cause suffering. He preferred to think of himself as ending it. 

Justice was slow, but vengeance was sweeter. 

He was impersonal about the slaughter. That was a part of the soldier which he held onto, though he could not be sure which soldier it was a remnant of now. Revenge was a dish best served cold, and it was more efficient to calculate everything before a surgical strike. 

He had become the perfect soldier now, nothing more, nothing less.

Not an american soldier, not The Winter Soldier. Just The Soldier. 

A one man army of righteousness. 

He had resources, identities, skills, and he travelled the world under the radar, leaving trails of blood and smoke behind him as he dug up the secrets of those who were running the world, or ruining it. 

It had begun as a campaign against Hydra, using his knowledge to wipe them off the map as blatantly as possible and leaving it behind for SHIELD to clean up the mess as he moved on to the next target. 

Hydra had its ties all around the world though, figures in government, heads of state, CEOs... and it was never their only dirty little secret. So he found out everything they had done, and he left behind the evidence, making the world a little cleaner with every kill. No matter how much money had been paid to make them disappear, to ensure they would be forgotten, The Soldier made sure they would be remembered. Amnesia could not be bought anymore. Some sins were too grave to be private.

His hands would never be clean of blood after decades as Hydra's toy, and if any of the beliefs of his youth lingered on, he was going to hell no matter how much he confessed. This would not be forgivable, and so he would use the rest of his hellish, tortured existence to wreak vengeance for the innocents destroyed by so many for their arrogant selfish greed. 

He was a man in name, but by nature more of a shell, an overly prolonged life born of cruel experiments whose purpose had not changed. The difference between The Soldier and The Winter Soldier was his acceptance of his charge in his very soul. 

He could never go home, but then, he wasn't sure he wanted to. 

If he caused enough destruction he would remembered, and perhaps his legacy would be a lesson to the world, a warning to never sink so low again.

He would go down in history as The Soldier. Not as Sergeant Barnes. Not as Hydra's pet.

He would be The Soldier.

Not a good man, not an angel, but a cleansing of some of the rot at the world's heart. 

He didn't care what they made of his legend beyond that.

He had done what was needed, and at the ending, the shadows and the screams would leave the world with him. At the ending, it would be enough. 

And they would remember.


End file.
